


Take a Look, It's in a Book

by SegaBarrett



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Bullying, Depression, F/M, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, origin story of sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 15:39:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11854599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Someone is sending Edward messages... But who? And why?





	Take a Look, It's in a Book

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Gotham, and I make no money from this.
> 
> A/N: If you are one of the few people not humming the origin of the title, then it's from "Reading Rainbow". Because I am a jerk.

Edward Nygma stared at the television, waiting to hear the name of the Riddler announced once more.

It felt beautiful to be on top. No Penguin to stand behind, no Galavan to suffer through news coverage on – just himself, on the screen, in the public eye, in the hearts and minds of all of Gotham.

The thing that went bump in the night while you were trying to figure it out.

Because no one was smarter than Edward Nygma.

He had known that since he had been very young. His mind was constantly moving, cycling. 

His parents hadn’t known what to make of him. They had always wanted a better son, one who could talk to people at fancy dinner parties about sports and movies instead of physics and obscure facts. Every guest to the Nygma household had walked away with their head a little cocked to the side, murmuring something about how the boy wasn’t quite right.

The school psychologist tested him; he beat the test. 

Everyone went home disappointed.

He left home at the age of seventeen, simply walked away from his graduation ceremony and took a train to begin anew in Gotham City.

He didn’t talk to them, now. He wondered if they had heard of him, heard of the Riddler.

He wondered if now, at last, they were finally proud.

Because now people paid attention to him. Now people knew.

***

He received the first note on a Wednesday; he noticed it as he removed his hat and gingerly placed it on the stand by his door. 

It was lying, neatly folded over, like one of those footballs kids made in the middle of classes; not that they’d ever thrown them to him. At him, sometimes.

It was odd to think back to those days. 

The first thing that went through his mind was – Penguin. Penguin had sent him a note.

Logically, that could not be the case. Because Penguin was dead. Dead and drowned and Ed had seen to it, he had gotten him out of his life and his head forever. Because now, now at last, he was the Riddler. 

And the Riddler did not have regrets, or pangs, or longings. All he had were riddles. Which, while tantalizing, were not the stuff of emotions. They were pure, unconcentrated logic.

And maybe that was what made him open the note. 

Written in type-script across the center of the scrap of paper was:  
 _“That death's unnatural that kills for loving.  
Alas, why gnaw you so your nether lip?  
Some bloody passion shakes your very frame:  
These are portents; but yet I hope, I hope,  
They do not point on me.”_

Ed cocked his head to the side – the words were familiar, it was true, but he couldn’t quite conjure up where he had heard it before, as if he was peeking through a window into a locked room.

It stirred something within him, however. Who was sending him notes? What did they mean? Were they a taunt, or a flirt – was someone asking him to come out and play with them? And if so, what did that entail?

There was something odd in it, an excitement at being invited to be a part of a game. That was usually his play, usually his call, cajoling Oswald (he wouldn’t think of Oswald, not now, not again) or Jim Gordon or whoever his opponent or friend (he did not have friends, it was not something useful to him, not something that could further his goals; best avoided) was, calling them to the show.

A moment later, he was sitting at the computer, typing in the quote. It was a shame, really – the internet had taken a lot of wonder out of life. Now, one didn’t need to really ask questions internally; they could simply type them in and have a factual explanation within a minute. 

There wasn’t much room for ambiguity.

Maybe, in some ways, Ed was like a computer – unchanging, fixed, in some ways at least; and every-growing and changing in others. 

Maybe he was doubling inside, and maybe he was growing out of the pen built for him. Maybe part of that had been Oswald’s doing.

He didn’t want to just sit and wait for whoever – or, well this was Gotham, what – this was to contact him again.

But, without another clue, he couldn’t really follow up on it.

All he had learned was that this quote was from Othello. From Desdemona’s death scene.

From when Othello strangled her.

***

The next day, he went about his business as always, planning out the next moment he would let Gotham know to fear the Riddler.

To notice him, to respect him. 

Because no one had ever truly respected him before.

Not as if anyone did now. They feared him, maybe (hopefully, they should, if they knew what was good for them), but they didn’t respect him. 

No one had looked at him the way he had once looked at Oswald Copplepot. 

He should have known that what Oswald wanted to give him in return was something else, something less. Something that Ed was sure he couldn’t give.

He had loved people once, that was true. But that love had always ended in death.

Maybe that was the most beautiful part of all, the end of it all.

Oswald falling off the cliff and into the river to float away. 

***

The first girl that Ed had ever had a crush on had been named Darlene Spotnick.

He remembered it because it was almost-but-not-quite Sputnik, the Russian shuttle. 

She was the smartest girl in class, and she’d had long legs that Ed could see as he peeked under the desk to grab rulers, to grab pencils that the people behind him would flick at his head. 

Darlene wore glasses and socks that were too long and chewed on the end of her pencils.

She was perfect. 

***

That had been a long time ago. Ed had realized that he was not the kind of man who would “get the girl”, not the kind of man who would be happy in the end of the story. 

He could still remember Kristen’s eyes going dark, could still remember how he had fallen apart that night, how he had turned into someone else.

Had turned into someone who didn’t care, who didn’t love, who didn’t slow down; all logic, no emotion. 

He should have known better. He shouldn’t have thought about anything else other than being the Riddler, about showing Gotham how powerful he could be. Everything else was just a trick to get him led astray. So many men could have been great men, Ed thought to himself, had they not been distracted by petty emotion.

Then why wouldn’t his brain shut off about Oswald? It wasn’t as if that regret was going to do him any good. It was as pointless as his boiled grief over Isabella. At the end of the day, they were both dead, and in one way or another, he was the one to blame, the one left holding the bag.

There was no practical usage to feeling the fallout from that. If he pulled it away from himself, however – there was the answer. To convince himself that he felt nothing at all.

***

The next day, he returned home to find another note, this one taped to the inside of his door. This one was not folded, but written on a torn piece of paper in red colored pencil.

_“I came to Shawshank when I was just twenty, and I am one of the few people in our happy little family willing to own up to what he did. I committed murder. I put a large insurance policy on my wife -- who was three years older than I was -- and then I fixed the brakes on the Chevrolet coupe her father had given us as a wedding present.”_

Ed scratched his head again, the quote seeming vaguely familiar but the riddle falling flat somewhere in his tired brain.

He was usually sharper than this. It had to be Oswald that was making him foggy, which didn’t make any sense; he didn’t feel anything for that man, he didn’t, he didn’t. So why did it matter to him? Why did he wake up thinking he might see Oswald in the corner of his room? Why did he think he would see the man, stringy hair damply stuck to his forehead and his eyes wide and accusatory? 

He had had to do it, for Isabella’s sake. It was a crime that could not go unanswered. Oswald would have understood, if he could talk to him now. Hadn’t Oswald done the same to Galavan over his mother?

But – the voice in his head reminded him, sounding so much like Oswald – Oswald’s mother had been killed to create terror; Isabella had been killed to ensure love.

Which was worse?

He put the note aside; he wouldn’t worry about it now, he would get some sleep and everything would be clearer in the morning. It seemed like something that Oswald would tell him, something based on Oswald’s mother’s advice to him.

He needed to do something to stop thinking about Oswald.

He took a handful of sleeping pills and slipped into his bed.

***

Someone had thrown a rock through his window once when he was growing up. There had been a note wrapped around it and when Ed had unfurled it, it had given a command in huge, red, capital letters: KILL YOURSELF. 

And he, he was ashamed to say, had considered the request. Perhaps there had been something to it, the idea of taking himself out of the equation. It wasn’t as if he saw much around to stick around for – getting his head stuck in more toilets? Having tacks put on his seat? And being told, ever so gently, that the world would be better off without him in it. No thanks, Ed thought, it would be better if I passed up all of this and went to go live in Mars or Purgatory or wherever else will take me. 

Now, he did not quite consider the request as he slept but he mulled it over, wondering what exactly it would be like to step over into the afterlife.

The place where Isabella was, now, the place where he would be one day, eventually – perhaps today, and perhaps by his own hand.

Trying to get revenge on Penguin barely filled the days anymore, he was sad to say.

And so he slept. And slept.

***

And received yet another note, wrapped up and stuffed into an envelope and dropped unceremoniously into his mailbox, which he rarely checked. It appeared that whoever was sending these was sending them with increasing fervor, or perhaps increasing desperation. Who could be desperately trying to get through to Ed? 

Or who could be pretending to be trying to get through? That was another possibility, of course – that there was someone trying to drive him insane in the way that he had tried to drive Oswald insane.

But there was nothing left that would do that to him. Nothing left unless…  
He opened the note to read: _“It's necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.”_

He rubbed at his eyes and made his way down the stairs and out the door. He needed to walk.

He needed rest, he needed to relax and figure out what was tap-tap-tapping at his brain. He was letting a dead Oswald get to him, and that was what was killing him most of all. Why was he allowing the former mayor any more space in his head than he already had?

He thought about the quote – was he wishing for death, now? Had Oswald, once he discovered Ed could not love him?

What was worse than to be forever separated from the one you love more than life itself?

And was that how Oswald had felt when he had plummeted to his death?

What had Ed done?

***

There was no rising workday, not anymore. Ed had killed that when he had taken Oswald’s life. Unless he counted this as a workday, rising and scheming and wondering if and when more notes could arrive, taunting him with riddles he was too twisted up to figure out (probably obvious) answers to. They were all from books, he discovered with some research, but the connection wasn’t clear at all. 

That was until the next morning, when an actual book dropped into his front room, thrown (from where….?) through a window, weighted down with a rock.  
The book was titled Death and the Penguin.

***

“This heat is unbearable.” Oswald Copplepot smoothed down his hair with a grimace, scratching at the back of his neck. His stomach still screamed from the bullet wound every time he moved, but he was used to it now. He was used to a lot of things.

“A good day to be indoors.”

The woman’s short, blonde hair stuck to the back of her neck as she leaned against the outside of the window. 

“We should let him know, soon,” she said, knotting her hands together and peeking across the gap, nearly able to see into Ed’s window. “We should let him know.”

“Let him know what? That I’m harder to kill than he thought?”

“Don’t be a brat, Oswald.”

“You’re harder to kill than I thought, too, Isabelle.”

She rolled her eyes.

“It wasn’t ever Isabelle. But now it’s the Bookworm, thanks.”

Now it was Oswald’s time to roll his eyes, then to run his hands through his own hair, sticky and tangled and curled against his bruised skull.

“I’ll make sure to return all my library books or fear your wrath.”

“Shut up. The important thing is, you’re not going to hurt him.”

“He tried to kill me! I’m not supposed to try and hurt him?”

“And you actually did kill me.” Isabella smirked and twirled a piece of blonde hair, moved it down and chewed on it slightly. “We’re going to change the game, Oswald.”

“To what? Hooked on Phonics? Go Dog Go?” 

“I could throw you off of this, you know. It would serve you right.” She knotted her hands together and cracked her knuckles. Then she brushed another lock away and watched as Ed paced in his apartment. Poor thing. “We’ll show him soon,” she said, more to herself than to Oswald. “He’ll see us.”

“He’ll see me,” Oswald mumbled. 

“The past and the future,” she said, “Together as one. Gotham doesn’t know what it’s in for.”

With that, she turned and began to walk down the staircase. There was more research to be done, no doubt.

**Author's Note:**

> Note #1 - Othello
> 
> Note #2 - Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption
> 
> Note #3 - The Count of Monte Cristo


End file.
